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Mapping software giant Esri has recently published “story maps,” self contained interactives in which maps anchor the narrative. The latest example uses symbols on a world map to show the destination cities of Titanic passengers. Larger symbols represent more passengers traveling to a specific destination. It also has a pie chart showing how many survived the disaster:

Using the top navigation bar you can toggle the maps to see how passengers in the various ticket classes fared. More than half of the first-class passengers survived, for example, while only about a quarter of the third-class passengers (think Leonardo DiCaprio‘s character) survived:

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This year’s Academy Awards presentation seemed to drag on forever, but it wasn’t actually that long compared to past shows. The event last lasted 194 minutes, which is slightly longer than the average since the mid-1980s (183 minutes), but relatively short compared to the four-hour-plus show in 2002:

About 39.3 million people tuned in for the show, a four-percent increase over the 2011. The best ratings since the mid-1980s came in 1998, when Titanic won best picture:

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I just returned from the NICAR journalism convention in St. Louis, where I helped teach hands-on panels for using TileMill, the open-source mapping application. This first map we made shows the murder rate per 100,000 residents in the nation’s largest cities:

Reports about January’s fundraising numbers, released on February 20, have focused on two narratives: Mitt Romney’s limited fundraising and high burn rate and the role that super PACs are playing in an increasingly contested Republican primary. HuffPost decided to combine those narratives together to make a graphic of candidate and super PAC fundraising and spending in January.

There are just over 526,000,000 Christian kids under the age of 14 in the world who celebrate Christmas on December 25th. In other words, Santa has to deliver presents to almost 22 million kids an hour, every hour, on the night before Christmas. That’s about 365,000 kids a minute; about 6,100 a second. Totally doable.

Last night Robert Griffin III became the first Baylor football player to win the Heisman Trophy, the college game’s highest honor. Griiffin was the 76th player to receive the award — and the 28th quarterback — since the tradition began in 1936.

The winner is selected from ballots cast by hundreds of sports journalists, and past honorees. Each votes for three players, and ranks them on scale from first place (three points) to third place (one point). The higher the points received by a player, the more unanimous his selection as the winner.

Griffin received 1,687 points, slightly above the average winner over the years. Here’s how players have compared since the start (colored in Baylor green):